Six Banks in Poland viz Alior Bank, Bank Millennium, Bank Zachodni
WBK, BRE Bank, ING Bank Śląski and PKO Bank Polsk, have a 70%
share in Poland’s electronic banking market. These 6 banks have joined hands to
form a joint venture.
The joint venture main aim is to define a common standard
for mobile payments, which if successful, will cut down the reliance on Visa and
MasterCard in the Polish eBanking arena. The new standards will be developed under the
guidance of the national regulator.
The offering is modeled around PKO
Bank's IKO app, which was launched in March and lets customers make
in-store payments and ATM withdrawals by keying in a code generated by the app.
Customers can also send money to recipients by entering their mobile phone
number, like Barclays Pingit in the UK.
The proposed system is designed to bypass
card firms, a fact that PKO's MD of electronic banking, Wojciech Bolanowski,
admitted at MobeyDay last month, Visa was "not happy about".
Bank Millennium CEO Boguslaw Kott has
openly admitted that the group is challenging Visa and MasterCard, telling
Reuters: "This will be a more competitive system compared to the credit
card system. The credit card system will probably be put under a question mark
in the future."
The differentiator between the new Polish
Collaboration in comparison with like Spain and the UK, is that the Polish
system has the backing of only financial institutions and not a combination of
telcos and financial institutions.
None of the six will have a
dominating position, each using the same platform and then adding their own
extra features, while the group says it is also open to bringing other banks
and acquirers onboard.
